Wednesday, November 9, 2016

The pollsters had Hillary ahead by a little. But Trump won. What happened?
The short of it is, we voters were given two unpalatable candidates. One candidate promised to get the country back on the right track. The other insisted that we were on the right track all along. But we weren't, we still aren't, and everybody except newsies know it.
Basically Wall St speculators crashed the world economy back in 2008. And it has stayed crashed. US GNP growth has been a measly 1% per year for the eight years of Obama. It should be 3%. Obamacare, the war on coal, 80,000 pages of new federal regulation, crazy federal tax policies and general federal meddling has combined to flatten US economic growth. And people feel it, they cannot find jobs, their children cannot find jobs, they don't get raises, they loose their houses to foreclosure, and everything costs more. The country is on the wrong track and everyone knows it.
So, faced with two unpalatable candidates, voters went for the unpalatable candidate that promised to fix the economy, rather than the unpalatable candidate that claimed things were just peachy.
The profession of economics did not help the situation. Economist say a depression is over when things stop getting worse. Great Depression 2.0 flattened out way back in 2008 but it hasn't gone away, the economy is still not growing. Voters, workers, and citizens don't think a depression is over until things climb back up to where they used to be (ought to be). So we had all the economists (a lefty lot) claiming Great Depression 2.0 was over back i9n 2009. The Obama administration liked this myth, and spread it around, and the newsies (another lefty lot) picked it up and pushed it.
But truth is stronger than fiction, and the voters knew things were bad and voted for a guy who said he would fix them, despite that guy's big mouth.

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Not really for The Donald. He has Hillary to trash, Sanders voters to woo, women voters to pacify, his base wanting more red meat speeches, some backstabbing inside his own campaign (Cory Lewandoski and the Republican establishment), and a number of way out campaign promises (get Mexico to pay for the wall, ban Muslim immigration, and others) that will be very hard to make good on. That seems like a pretty full house of troubles needing dealing with.
For real amazement, the newsies are reporting that Hillary has been spending millions on TV ads. The Donald is spending zip on TV. The last poll they showed on TV had The Donald pretty much even with Hillary despite the wide difference in TV ad spending.
Can The Donald pull it off? Or are we doomed to a Hillary presidency?